Past Episodes: April 2011 Archives

Saturday April 30, 2011

This week, The Age of Persuasion looks at part two of how Madison Avenue invented the Happy Homemaker. While advertising encouraged women to aspire to be housewives in the 50s and 60s, that stay-at-home stereotype was called out onto the carpet by a best-selling book titled The Feminine Mystique in 1963. That book and others like it helped fuel the embers of Women's LIb - which eventually led the Happy Homemaker to run smack into feminism in the 1970s. Women were now in the workforce in record numbers, but they were still balancing careers with motherhood. That juggling act would eventually create the next powerful archetype - which Madison Avenue would happily co-opt - and it would become the dominant female image to this day.

Saturday April 2, 2011

This week on the Age of Persuasion, we look at "Dynamic Duos" - those rare ad agency/client relationships that resulted in some of the most famous advertising of all time. We'll examine the relationship between Nike founder Phil Knight and his ad agency creative director Dan Wieden, Apple's Steve Job and Creative Director Lee Clow, temperamental winery owner Julio Gallo and his legendary creative director and tough guy, Hal Riney, and we'll tell the story of the creative director who created a Hall of Fame campaign around the fact his client looked like a chicken.